Titan of Terps
When it comes to Cannabis industry bona fides, Trichome Technologies founder Kenneth “K” Morrow’s resume is as impressive as they come. Over the past three decades, he’s developed sophisticated grow systems and hash-making techniques and bred numerous award-winning cultivars that have graced the covers, centerfolds and calendars of High Times and the many other Cannabis publications around the world that he’s contributed to. High Times even ranked his garden number one in their top grow rooms of all time in June 1999. But perhaps his most historic accomplishment is becoming the first person on record to extract and isolate terpenes from Cannabis.
Seeds of Greatness
Ken Morrow spent his entire youth around agriculture: first, growing up in Napa Valley, where his parents taught him how to garden; then later in Winters, where he worked at agricultural packing plants. So it’s no surprise that, after first trying marijuana at age 11, his thoughts almost immediately turned to cultivation.
“My friend Richie and I would smoke in his car in front of his house, and every time we’d clean the weed, we’d throw the seeds out the window,” he reminisces. “Well, one of those seeds sprouted in his front yard, and I asked him if I could have it.”
Predictably, the plant died, but Morrow’s lifelong fascination with Cannabis was born. He started reading High Times cover to cover every month, and in 1977, he ordered an all-in-one grow kit called the Hydro Pot from one of the magazine’s ads.
“It was basically a busboy tray with a lava rock, a fish aquarium aerator and a little bit of Miracle-Gro,” he recalls. “That’s the only hydroponic system I ever purchased — I hand-built all of them after that.”
Cultivation Career
Over the next two decades, Morrow continued to develop his cultivation skills — teaching himself to build complex hydroponic and aeroponic systems despite having no training in horticulture. However, he made up for his lack of formal education through the friendships he forged with the community’s most respected luminaries, including Robert Connell Clarke, Skunkman Sam, Mel Frank, Jorge Cervantes and Ed Rosenthal. And thanks to family connections in the Emerald Triangle, he also gained access to a wealth of rare landraces and heirloom genetics.
Eventually, his hard work paid off: With Rosenthal’s help, Morrow’s plants and gardens were soon gracing HT’s pages — including covers and centerfolds — on a regular basis. Of course, growing was still highly illegal back then, so to protect his identity, he was referred to in print as “K.”
Trichome Technologies
Morrow wanted to be known as more than a mere letter, though — he wanted to be a brand. So, in 1994, he conceptualized his own Cannabis research and development company called Trichome Technologies. Under Trichome Tech, he continued experimenting with various cultivation techniques and bred over 200 different varietals, including award-winning strains like Ultraviolet (aka Purple Kush) and G-13.
After the passage of Proposition 215 in 1996, K became a top supplier for the new dispensaries emerging in the Bay Area, such as Berkeley Patients Group and Patient ID Center. That same year, through his friendship with Rosenthal, K had the remarkable distinction of becoming the first Cannabis grower ever interviewed (albeit in shadow with his voice altered) on “60 Minutes” as part of Morley Safer’s marijuana segment “American Enterprise” (which also featured the 1995 Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam).
Hashing It Out
In addition to growing and breeding, Morrow also delved heavily into hash making — using his abundance of trim and shake to make water hash using the technique outlined in Skunkman’s infamous “Sadu Sam’s Secret” pamphlet (see our July 2024 issue). Morrow quickly built on that basic technique: upscaling it to a 32-gallon drum and cooling it using a titanium chiller and producing “ice hash” as early as 1995 (years before the Ice-O-Lator or Bubble Bags). As proof of this claim, Morrow notes that in 1997, he became the second grower ever (Mel Frank being the first) to have their flower and hashish tested at the nation’s only government-sanctioned Cannabis lab at the University of Mississippi — one sample of which was his water hash, which tested at 68% THC.
In April 2000, K penned his first article for HT entitled “Trichome Technologies’ Guide to Making Hash,” in which he outlined his at-home methods for making hand-rubbed, dry sieve and ice hash — marking the first time that the water hash method was published in the mag. That same year, he also wrote the first article ever published on butane hash extraction in Red Eye Magazine, wherein he detailed the method of “open blasting” using PVC pipe. Of course, he quickly developed methods to upscale that process significantly, producing large quantities of BHO nearly a decade before the dab revolution hit the mainstream Cannabis community. It was these efforts that would soon lead to his most monumental discovery.
Tapping the Terps
In his quest to produce cleaner concentrates, K did some research and learned that he could better expel his solvents by utilizing a vacuum drying oven, then purchased one from Chinese laboratory equipment manufacturer Across International. The oven worked great at purging the ethanol and water, but there was a problem: the water that evaporated during the process kept contaminating the vacuum pump, causing him to waste valuable pump oil.
K needed a way to prevent condensation from getting into the pump; luckily, Across recommended an accessory called a cold trap separator designed for that very purpose. After ordering and installing the device (and some other parts recommended by their technician), he saw excellent results — it captured all of the moisture, thus preserving the integrity of his oil. But while emptying the trap, he made an unexpected discovery.
“I went to eliminate the captured moisture, which was in the form of ice, and when I melted the ice with hot water, I was hit in the face with the aromatics of Cannabis terpenes,” he says. “I thought, ‘Wow — obviously I shouldn’t be flushing this down the sink!’”
Thus, in 2012, he became the first person to extract and isolate terpenes from Cannabis.
K began collecting the ice between runs and putting it all into graduated cylinders, where it would then melt and separate into a thin layer of purified essence oil atop the water. To maximize his terpene output, K started extracting from fresh plant material rather than dried — at least a year before Colorado concentrate makers Giddyup and Kind Bill came up with their first live resin.
Morrow wanted to get his liquid terpenes (aka “separate”) tested to find out exactly what he had, but the few Cannabis labs around at the time didn’t have the capabilities to do a complete analysis. So K contacted Rick Doblin at MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), who recommended he call Dr. Paul Daley, Sasha Shulgin’s research assistant. Dr. Daley, in turn, invited him to Shulgin’s chemistry lab in Lafayette, California — aka “The Farm.”
“I went to The Farm, and I was there with [Sasha] and Paul Daley … just the three of us doing some of the very first GCMS [gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer] and HPLC [high-performance liquid chromatography] quantification and testing of my separate,” he remembers fondly. The result? Over 100 different terpenes, only half of which they could even identify — more terpenes than had ever been recorded before.
Patents & Posers
K knew he’d stumbled into something big, so rather than write an article to share his new technique as he had in the past, he decided instead to protect his discovery by patenting his methodology.
“My first thought was to teach myself how to write and file a patent application,” he says. “But patents are very expensive, so I also had to get investors and lawyers.”
Filed in 2017, his patent has since been granted in Europe, Canada and Mexico but is still pending in America — held up by a slow, costly bureaucracy and a less-than-cooperative examiner. In the meantime, other companies have since entered the market selling isolated terpenes at exorbitant prices — isolates that Morrow claims don’t even come close to the purity and potency achieved by his low-temperature extraction method.
“I separate the terpenes in liquid form with no heat applied, as opposed to the others, which are steam distillates or hydrocarbon extracts,” he explains. “So the resulting isolate is a superior essence oil of pure terpenes as opposed to a syrupy essential oil that’s a mixture of both cannabinoids and terpenes.”
To clarify, if you’re doing a CO2 or hydrocarbon extraction, you inevitably accidentally reclaim some of those terpenes when you purge the solvent back out of the concentrate. And with steam distillation — where water vapor is percolated through the plant material — the resulting extraction is a “hydrosol,” which contains mostly the water-soluble aspects of the plant’s essence. It’s these hydrosols that producers were allegedly selling as “pure terpenes.”
“[Customers] thought all they were getting was terpenes when it wasn’t,” Morrow says. “Yes, it contains terpenes, but in minimal percentages — the majority of a hydrosol is water. So to be selling hydrosols as pure terpenes for $10 a drop is disingenuous.”
Morrow was so indignant about this practice that in August 2018, he wrote an article for HT entitled “The Great Terpene Swindle,” breaking down the different extraction methods and exposing the truth about the Cannabis terpene industry.
Recent Projects
In 2016, Morrow released his first book, the highly acclaimed “Marijuana Horticulture Fundamentals.” Last fall, he filed more terpene-related patents and is currently working on developing equipment to separate cannabinoids and terpenes from biomass on a commercial scale, cementing his status as one of the most respected and sought-after Cannabis consultants in the world and a true titan of terps.
